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Perfect Blue (Sub) Status: COMPLETE
Movie
Well, after seeing Paranoia Agent I HAD to see some of Satoshi Kon's other stuff and Perfect Blue is one I've been hearing about for a long time.
To summarize, when the credits rolled I could only give an audible, "For ****'s sake".
Perfect Blue centers around a pop idol who gives up her popularity in search of a career in dramatic acting. In the process, she realizes that someone is stalking her and pretending to her on that them thar new interwebs thingamajig.
Unlike Paranoia Agent where the subtext of a message is prevalent throughout, Perfect Blue unfolds as a mystery, but for the first third or so of the movie, it's seems like a pretty crappy mystery.
It takes around 10 minutes to get around to really establish anything important and from that point forward, our main character, Mima's, harasser is blatantly obvious.
He's the creepy looking guy that follows her everywhere and the camera constantly focuses on him. OF COURSE he's the one stalking her.
When the movie treads like this I'm just bored since all we're doing is waiting for the characters to realize what the audience already knows intuitively, however our expectations are thrown bodily out the window as soon as Mima starts hallucinating her old pop idol persona following her around and calling her a fake.
At first I'm inclined to rule in favor of what Paranoia Agent was trying to do by simply representing her inner feelings outwardly, so when she looks into a mirror and sees the old Mima we can be lead to believe that perhaps she's having regrets about her career choice, after all we're reminded several times throughout the movie that her pop group is not only doing well without her, but better, so it stands to reason that she'd probably be feeling left out, right?
No. She's ACTUALLY seeing this person, she reacts to her, she yells at her, she even chases her. For all intents and purposes, Mima is either seeing a real person who looks exactly like her and can defy the laws of physics, or she's hallucinating.
This is my biggest problem with the whole movie.
The rest of the movie plays out very straightforward with a Mima's co-workers mysteriously getting axed off one by one, but it eventually pulls timeskips, dream sequences, and starts heavily blurring reality suggesting everything from the stalker is killing them, to she's killing them, to it's all a dream, to it's all a tv show, it gets MAD.
The movie starts off so simple, but it's an utter mind**** by the end where you don't know if she's dreaming, if she's on set, if the detectives she working with are actually REAL, it crosses the boundaries of a boring obvious mystery in the first act, to an annoying gotcha! mystery in the second act, and finally it snowballs into a truly mindbending whodunnit by the third act.
There IS a definite answer which I appreciate, I'm a pretty sick of the WHATDOESITALLMEAN type of endings, but the one thing that I think screws it up is her hallucinations.
Like I said, it'd be one thing if they were just visual metaphors like in Paranoia Agent, but because the character OBVIOUSLY BELIEVES THEY ARE THERE, it stretches the plausibility of it to it's breaking point to suggest that on top of the appreciably more complex answer than the otherwise obvious setup in the first act, she's also conveniently delusional.
That... really messed up the experience for me more than anything else, especially when as soon as you introduce a hallucinatory character you're immediately dropkicking the existing possible answer and substituting Shutter Island.
There are moments I definitely liked about Perfect Blue, I liked some of the shots, I liked how while they were filming the rape scene the actor playing the rapist apologizes to her during a cut, and I like the barely recognizable foreshadowing where it seems natural in the moment, but it carries greater significance later on.
The idea of a chaste pop idol moving on to a crime drama where she plays both a victim and a killer and begins posing nude does seem like a stark enough contrast to justify a superfan to stalk her and call her a traitor. I really liked the blurring between the murder scenes in real life and in the television show and all of what it could potentially imply about the events in the movie.
But that illusion **** though. Ugh.
Well don't worry, you can wake up now because I'm not giving the infallible Satoshi Kon a negative review because
Movie
Well, after seeing Paranoia Agent I HAD to see some of Satoshi Kon's other stuff and Perfect Blue is one I've been hearing about for a long time.
To summarize, when the credits rolled I could only give an audible, "For ****'s sake".
Perfect Blue centers around a pop idol who gives up her popularity in search of a career in dramatic acting. In the process, she realizes that someone is stalking her and pretending to her on that them thar new interwebs thingamajig.
Unlike Paranoia Agent where the subtext of a message is prevalent throughout, Perfect Blue unfolds as a mystery, but for the first third or so of the movie, it's seems like a pretty crappy mystery.
It takes around 10 minutes to get around to really establish anything important and from that point forward, our main character, Mima's, harasser is blatantly obvious.
He's the creepy looking guy that follows her everywhere and the camera constantly focuses on him. OF COURSE he's the one stalking her.
When the movie treads like this I'm just bored since all we're doing is waiting for the characters to realize what the audience already knows intuitively, however our expectations are thrown bodily out the window as soon as Mima starts hallucinating her old pop idol persona following her around and calling her a fake.
At first I'm inclined to rule in favor of what Paranoia Agent was trying to do by simply representing her inner feelings outwardly, so when she looks into a mirror and sees the old Mima we can be lead to believe that perhaps she's having regrets about her career choice, after all we're reminded several times throughout the movie that her pop group is not only doing well without her, but better, so it stands to reason that she'd probably be feeling left out, right?
No. She's ACTUALLY seeing this person, she reacts to her, she yells at her, she even chases her. For all intents and purposes, Mima is either seeing a real person who looks exactly like her and can defy the laws of physics, or she's hallucinating.
This is my biggest problem with the whole movie.
The rest of the movie plays out very straightforward with a Mima's co-workers mysteriously getting axed off one by one, but it eventually pulls timeskips, dream sequences, and starts heavily blurring reality suggesting everything from the stalker is killing them, to she's killing them, to it's all a dream, to it's all a tv show, it gets MAD.
The movie starts off so simple, but it's an utter mind**** by the end where you don't know if she's dreaming, if she's on set, if the detectives she working with are actually REAL, it crosses the boundaries of a boring obvious mystery in the first act, to an annoying gotcha! mystery in the second act, and finally it snowballs into a truly mindbending whodunnit by the third act.
There IS a definite answer which I appreciate, I'm a pretty sick of the WHATDOESITALLMEAN type of endings, but the one thing that I think screws it up is her hallucinations.
Like I said, it'd be one thing if they were just visual metaphors like in Paranoia Agent, but because the character OBVIOUSLY BELIEVES THEY ARE THERE, it stretches the plausibility of it to it's breaking point to suggest that on top of the appreciably more complex answer than the otherwise obvious setup in the first act, she's also conveniently delusional.
That... really messed up the experience for me more than anything else, especially when as soon as you introduce a hallucinatory character you're immediately dropkicking the existing possible answer and substituting Shutter Island.
There are moments I definitely liked about Perfect Blue, I liked some of the shots, I liked how while they were filming the rape scene the actor playing the rapist apologizes to her during a cut, and I like the barely recognizable foreshadowing where it seems natural in the moment, but it carries greater significance later on.
The idea of a chaste pop idol moving on to a crime drama where she plays both a victim and a killer and begins posing nude does seem like a stark enough contrast to justify a superfan to stalk her and call her a traitor. I really liked the blurring between the murder scenes in real life and in the television show and all of what it could potentially imply about the events in the movie.
But that illusion **** though. Ugh.
Well don't worry, you can wake up now because I'm not giving the infallible Satoshi Kon a negative review because
IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]